Selecting the greatest of all works for the operatic stage may be a fool’s errand, but choosing the most delightful is relatively easy. That laurel wreath must go to the Grand Pooh–Bah of all comedies, Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” a show that was a smash at its premiere in 1885 and has been an audience favorite in both professional and amateur productions ever since. On Saturday, the Amato Opera preserved that winning tradition.

The company was in rollicking spirits for this high-energy production. Those who have been to this dollhouse on the Bowery know the tiny size of its stage, and the challenge — to mount a high quality effort in such a tiny area — was met head-on by director Mark W. Bentley, who, in the best Amato tradition of multitasking, also appeared in the role of the Pooh-Bah. Mr. Bentley even choreographed dance numbers.

The Amato employs a rotating cast, so there are sometimes singers of less than stellar quality in certain roles, but this day everyone was fine. When “The Mikado” was composed, “Madama Butterfly” had not yet been written, but “Il Trovatore” had, and the action begins with a famous song right out of Manrico’s music. Victor Zaccardi was a sweet Nanki-Poo, his “A Wand’ring Minstrel I” was quite fluid and arresting. He was matched in his ingenuous vocalism by Alea Vorillas’s Yum-Yum.

Ms. Vorillas was, in fact, appealing throughout. When joined by her two sisters, played by Shea Mavros and Angel Vail, she shone in a charming blend. The Amato demonstrated that, even after over 100 years of British public school and American Ivy League renditions, “Three Little Maids From School” can still be sung quite fetchingly by a trio of women.

The plum part is that of the Lord High Executioner, a role memorably performed by Groucho Marx in a 1960 Bell Telephone Hour presentation. Ray Calderon made the most of it, combining savvy stage business with a warm voice and excellent pitch control. He even recalled Groucho, trying out a few ad libs and expertly straddling that razor thin line between parody and poignancy. “Willow, tit-willow” may seem on its surface to be a simple song, but is really the emblem of this entire masterpiece. Mr. Calderon’s unusual love song not only scored a direct hit with his potential bride, but also with the appreciative crowd as well.

Nathan Hull was a resonant Mikado, with his thrilling voice expressing the arbitrariness of power.

When he sang of “letting the punishment fit the crime” he possessed just the right combination of insanity and dilettantism that makes this G&S satire so sharply biting.

But while all of these performances were wonderful, one simply blew all the others away. Helen Van Tine as the Daughter-in-Law Elect hit that stage like a tsunami, her glorious mezzo shaking the rafters with its vocal power and richness of tone. She did an excellent job with a complex character that progresses from a one-dimensional witch to an empathetic, rejected maiden — her “Alone, and yet alive” was superb — and back again to a sadistic, but lovably so, manipulator in the great sardonic duet “There is beauty in the bellow of the blast,” which included some snappy dancing with Mr. Calderon.

For this performance, the company dispensed with what conductor Anthony Amato calls his “orchestrina” and relied instead on the lively accompaniment of Jeongeun Yom at the piano. There may have been a more elaborate “Mikado” in the past, but none that better captured the unique spirit of the work than this one.

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The Juilliard School’s Paul Hall has been the site of hundreds of excellent student recitals and chamber performances. But professionals play this intimate room on occasion, and Thursday evening the New York Woodwind Quintet offered a program of music from five different countries in five very different styles.

If you are Brazilian or have listened to a substantial amount of the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, then you know that a choros is a type of indigenous dance that builds from the soft and slow to the loud and fast. Samuel Baron, flutist and founding member of NYWQ, asked Villa-Lobos to transpose his “Quinteto em forma de choros” for the standard wind quintet, replacing the high octaves of the English horn with the midrange of the French one. Current French hornist William Purvis, however, took upon himself the challenge of performing the original part on his lowerpitched instrument. It was an heroic effort, albeit a somewhat unsuccessful one.

Mr. Baron also developed his own arrangement of Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue” for various combinations of string quartet and wind quintet. The group (Carol Wincenc, flute, Stephen Taylor, oboe, Charles Neidich, clarinet, Marc Goldberg, bassoon, and Mr. Purvis, horn) presented three of these contrapuntal essays, each with different instrumentation. Mr. Taylor played the English horn for the first of the trio, and the transcription had its advantages, most notably a distinct timbral separation of the five musical lines. The end result, however, was decidedly pedantic, and certainly lightyears away from the spiritual essence of Bach. It was difficult to pinpoint whether it was the Baron orchestration or the current performance that was at fault, but the piece was dry as dust. In the second, only three members participated — Bach never indicated what instrumentation he was envisioning, so anything goes in these pieces. Finally, the third work was for standard wind quintet, but there was an oddly raucous sound to it that again did not seem to fit the cosmological musings from Leipzig.

Mr. Neidich rather facetiously warned us that the American premiere of Metallaxis by the Cypriot Evis Sammoutis had more pages of instructions than of printed music. What it actually contained was a lexicon of contemporary effects, from the obligatory dying quail of the oboe to the use of the five instruments as percussion accessories. In the midst of the whistling, drumming, fluttertonguing and pantomiming — the players sometimes putting their fingers on their keys but not their lips on their mouthpieces — were some random musical notes.

A piece of modern music opened the second half of the program, as Fred Lerdahl was on hand to receive some well-deserved applause for a work titled Episodes and Refrains, a musical double acrostic wherein the three episodes of equal length are variations of each other. More clever than profound, the essay fascinates by folding onto itself while significantly varying its moods with the intervening refrains. Lots of fun for the listener and a good workout for the players.

The program had been a little light on content until the final number, and needed a strong performance of a significant work to make this evening a success. The group ended with a flourish by intoning a fine realization of the mighty Wind Quintet of the Dane Carl Nielsen. Here the group’s playing was intricately coordinated and its enunciation of the hymn that is the focus of the final theme and variations was both lovely and powerful.

Note to Mr. Sammoutis: Nielsen employs animal noises too, but he places them in a wondrous musical context.